Together Tea (9 page)

Chapter Fourteen

Pumpkin Stew

I
t wasn't easy leaving. They waited longer than most. Some families left when the Shah's tanks entered central Tehran. But Mina's parents said the upheaval might turn out to be a good thing. It could bring democracy. Freedom. Mina detected in her parents an actual desire for the monarchy to end, which she found blasphemous. Mina loved to watch the parades on TV celebrating the Shah and his wife, Farah. The king and queen looked absolutely fabulous—dressed in burgundy velvet cloaks draped over intricately embroidered silver coats, golden crowns encrusted with diamonds and rubies balanced on their heads. Their jewels sparkled. At the sound of trumpets, hundreds of men saluted. The music was majestic. Mina would leap up off the Persian rug to salute the Shah along with the masses. She couldn't help it.

Hooman bought posters of the new revolutionary leaders. He listened to their speeches and tried to grow a beard. He put away his fancy polo shirts and wore simple peasant-style cotton shirts and baggy pants. Girls whom Mina used to see walking home from the university in their platform shoes and miniskirts, their long hair swaying seductively down their backs, began to don headscarves and stopped wearing makeup. Everywhere she looked, Islam was in, and anything that reminded people of the Shah or his Western ways was considered old, outdated, and plain uncool.

One day the Shah left and the world changed. The revolution's new religious leaders took over. People spray-painted the words “FREEDOM,” “REVOLUTION,” “ISLAMIC REPUBLIC” on street walls. People whom Mina had never seen observing the Muslim faith before started to become religious. Aunt Nikki's daughter, Maryam, emptied out her drawer of makeup and lipstick and filled it instead with prayer beads and prayer stones. Maryam threw out her skimpy dresses and tight tops and went to the bazaar and bought simple headscarves and Islamic uniforms.

It was hard to keep up with who was on which side. Revolutionary or anti-revolutionary? When Mina and her family went to people's homes, sometimes wine was served and other times sermons were given on the evils of alcohol. Sometimes one spouse served wine while the other angrily denounced it as it was being poured. Families were divided.

Every afternoon Baba used a stepladder to remove the pictures of the new leader that Hooman had put up in the house. With increasing fervor, Hooman climbed on top of bookshelves and furniture to tack the pictures back up.

“We have gotten rid of the dictator,” Hooman said in his changing voice. “We have freed the country of his contamination.”

IN THE KITCHEN, AUNT NIKKI WHISPERED
to Darya while Mina eavesdropped.

“My kids are slipping away from me,” Aunt Nikki said. “My kids tell me I'm wrong, old-fashioned, too Westernized. Sometimes it feels like my children aren't even mine anymore. It's become like they're
theirs
. Children of
their
propaganda.”

Darya leaned against the kitchen counter, thinking. Then her face lit up. “Invite them over. They can't resist my pumpkin stew. I'll talk to Maryam. Parviz will talk to Reza. We'll talk some sense into their fanatic teenage skulls.”

Aunt Nikki frowned at first, but then she thanked her younger sister. A time for the dinner was set. For the first time in weeks, Mina saw Aunt Nikki relax again. Darya said no need to thank her, they'd do their best.

Mina pretended Aunt Nikki was right to be so hopeful. Never mind that Darya hadn't been able to talk sense into Hooman's skull.

MINA AND KAYVON RAN TO OPEN
the door to find Uncle Hamed standing there, hat in hand, his face weary. Aunt Nikki was still by the car, talking to the closed windows in a coaxing voice. After several minutes, Cousin Reza came out of the car. He looked taller than when Mina had seen him last. Though he was only sixteen, a little stubble had grown on his chin.

“Come, let me see you!” Darya rushed to give her nephew a kiss. But he shrank away from her.

A woman in a black chador followed Reza into the house.

“Say hello, Maryam,” Aunt Nikki said.

Mina and Kayvon nudged each other. This was their glamorous eighteen-year-old cousin who only a few months ago had been giggling and flirting with the greengrocer's son? This was the Maryam who had worn high heels and tight blue jeans, her eyelids green from sparkly eye shadow? Mina stared at the new cousin in front of her.

“Tea?” Darya almost shouted, as though Maryam were hard of hearing because of her cover-up.

Mina and Kayvon scrambled to go help in the kitchen. When Mina came back balancing a tray of hourglass-shaped
estekan
filled with dark chai, she saw that Darya had plopped herself next to Maryam and was talking and laughing and gesturing wildly. Maryam was nodding politely, the way one nods at an older person who is losing her mind.

Baba methodically asked Reza about his studies. “I remember,” Baba said, “when you were four years old and you'd beg me to put you up on my shoulders. Remember that? Remember we'd play hide-and-seek outside?”

Reza scowled.

At dinner, Maryam ate with one hand, grasping her chador tightly with the other.

“Maryam Joon, I told you already, while I respect that you are now a devout follower, we're all family here, you really don't need to cover your hair from family. You know that, don't you?” Darya's façade of good cheer was disappearing.

Aunt Nikki looked as if she might cry. Maryam loosened her chador a tiny bit. Reza growled about the deaths caused in prisons by the Shah. Hooman listened raptly to Reza's words. Darya's vein throbbed in her forehead. Baba kept asking Uncle Hamed if he wanted more wine, but in a half-whisper, when Reza wasn't looking.

When it was time to kiss the guests good-bye, Maryam hugged them all, but Reza didn't want to be touched. “But we're
family
,” Darya insisted. Reza angrily said good-bye and then marched off to the car.

From behind the living room curtains, Mina saw Maryam walk to the car door and lift the bottom of her chador ever so slightly before climbing in, like Cinderella with her ball gown. Uncle Hamed and Aunt Nikki waved from the front seat with apologetic smiles. They drove off with Maryam and Reza expressionless in the backseat.

Mina and her family stood in the doorway, waving as the car drove away.

“That was . . .” Baba sighed. “A pumpkin stew I won't forget.”

Hooman continued to look at the street, spellbound. “Reza said that if we are relentless in our demands, we can get revenge on . . .”

Suddenly Darya took Hooman's face in both her hands. “Listen.
Khoob goosh kon.
Listen well. I am your mother. You got that? You listen to
me
. The picture comes down.
Basseh!
Enough! Go brush your teeth. Go put on your pajamas. Go on, then!”

Hooman was quiet. Mina thought he almost looked scared.

“Go!”

Hooman walked toward his bedroom.

“Put your pajamas on and brush your teeth!” Darya yelled out after him.

Hooman pulled off his sweater as he walked.

“That's right! Go get ready for bed! I am your mother!! I'm sick of this
chart-o-part
nonsense!”

Mina heard the faucet turn on in the bathroom.

Darya turned to Mina and Kayvon. “You two as well. Go on! Get ready for bed. Nobody tells you what to do except your father and me. You got that?”

“Darya Joon, it's time for all of us to rest.” Baba pulled Darya away.

Darya shook his hand off her. She continued to yell at Mina and Kayvon, “I am your mother. You don't follow anybody else's stupidity, EVER!”

“Come on, Darya Joon, come on.” Baba led Darya away.

“They're not going to take them over, Parviz,” Darya said. “They're just children.”

That night Mina lay in bed thinking of Maryam and Reza. The cousins she once had were no longer there. Maryam and Reza behaved entirely differently now. While it was uncomfortable to think of how they had changed, what scared her more was seeing her mother yell like that. Ranting and raving, forehead vein throbbing; slowly morphing, it seemed these days, into a mother entirely new and strange.

MUCH TO EVERYONE'S RELIEF, HOOMAN'S
revolutionary zeal was, in fact, a passing phase. But by then, the zeal of the other teenagers and men and women who had marched the streets to end the Shah's dictatorship had brought about a change of regime. And the smallest corners of Darya's and Mina's lives began to feel the weight of that change.

Chapter Fifteen

Mamani and Rumi

W
hen Mina woke up, it was cold, and the snow outside looked like ice cream, the kind Darya drizzled with rose water. Darya was quiet in the car on the way to school. She drove Mina and her brothers now. It was no longer safe to walk. Even the fighting had stopped. There was silence in the streets, no more shouting. No more bloodshed. The Shah was trying to get to a place called America. Mina thought of him there. Would they treat him like a king? Would he go to Disneyland? Kayvon had once shown her pictures of that magical land. People were sitting in teacups. Enormous teacups that were pastel blue and pale pink and light green. In the pictures the Americans were laughing. “It's the Land of the Teacups,” Mina had said in wonder. And Darya had smiled and in their family after that they always called America “the Land of the Teacups.”

People began to disappear. Their neighbor was sleeping one night when the new government authorities banged on his front door, barged in, arrested him, and took him away. His daughters wore black now. Mina eyed them on the street and wondered what it was like to just have your father taken away. She worried about Baba. She didn't want him to show any signs of being anti-revolutionary.

OVER A YEAR AFTER THE REVOLUTION'S
success, Mina stood in front of the mirror in her bedroom, a scarf in her hand. “Is this how I do it?” she asked. Mamani and Darya sat behind her on the bed.

“Here, let me show you.” Mamani took the square piece of cloth from Mina and placed it on the bed, folding it into a triangle. Then she put the triangular-shaped cloth on top of Mina's head and tied a tight knot at her neck. Mina looked at herself in the mirror. A headscarf. She looked like one of her Russian dolls.

Darya tugged nervously at a baggy gray tunic that lay on Mina's bed. The sleeves were long and puffed out; the length was long. Buttons went straight down the front.

“This is your new uniform, Mina,” Darya said quietly. “Your
roopoosh
.”

“My uniform for school?” Mina asked.

“Yes,” Mamani said.

“Mark my words, before long they're going to change the law so that it's her uniform for going anywhere. They want to make hijab mandatory by law.”

“We don't know if they'll succeed,” Mamani said gently.

“Oh, they'll get their way. By force. You just wait.”

Mina picked up the heavy
roopoosh.
With her tenth birthday coming up, she was approaching the dangerous threshold of adolescence. She looked at herself. All of this—the long hair under that scarf, her round bottom, the tiniest hint of developing breasts—was considered a threat now. She had to cover up for school by law. Her body had become a liability.

Mamani came up behind her and slid the
roopoosh
onto Mina's arms. As she buttoned her up, Darya sat on the bed, arms crossed, frozen.

“Don't worry.” Mamani forced a laugh at her own daughter's pained expression. “Our history is filled with these extremes. Everything by force. When my mother wanted to walk down the street during Reza Shah's time with her chador, the police attacked and pulled it off her head. That's what they wanted to do then, make us Westernized, erase religion. Now they've decided we're too Westernized and should go back to our religion. The pendulum swings. One extreme to another.” She sighed and stepped back from Mina. “It's always through the women that the men express their agenda. Now she has to cover up so they can feel like they're in power.”

Mina was familiar now with “they.” Everything was “they” since the revolution. They were the leaders who had replaced the Shah. The brand-new regime. The new authorities. They were the ones the people now feared.

Mina wanted to tell her mother that the gray cloth covering her head and body felt unusual, but it was okay, she could manage it, her mother needn't worry so much. It seemed as if Darya fought anger all the time now. She snapped at Hooman. Burned the bottom of the rice so that their
tahdeeg
came out all black and charred instead of golden brown and smooth.

THE NEXT DAY, MINA FOUND
her mother at the dining room table leafing through yellowed sheets of paper.

“What's that, Maman?” All Mina saw on the page were numbers. Endless numbers, written in pencil, with unknown signs and symbols linking them. Why wasn't her mother cooking dinner? Why wasn't she patting meat into ovals for the
kotelet
dish they had on Wednesday nights?

Darya acted as though she hadn't heard her.

“What is it?” Mina asked again.

“Nothing,” Darya finally said. “Absolutely nothing.” She gathered up the papers.

On top of one page, Mina had seen the words “Darya Daneshjoo,” her mother's maiden name. The numbers looked like something Darya had written a long time ago. Maybe something for school.

“You did lots of math before,” Mina ventured.

“I did lots of things before,” Darya said. “Your father and brothers will be home soon. We have to cook dinner.”

They cooked together in silence. They sank their hands into the
kotelet
meat mixture. The ground beef, turmeric, salt, pepper, bread crumbs, cooked potatoes, and raw eggs oozed through Mina's fingers. She scooped up a small ball of the meat mixture and passed it to her mother. Darya pressed the ball between her palms and patted it into a perfect thin oval. She plopped it into the hot oil. They repeated that over and over again in silence. Mina wondered if Darya's head was with those number-filled pages. If she was still trying to solve those old-looking equations.

Mina stared at the pink ground beef in front of her and opened her mouth to say something. But Darya's posture was so stiff that Mina instead handed her a fresh blob of meat and watched as Darya made
kotelet
of all the same size and shape, as if manufactured by a machine. The meat sizzled in the oil.

From the kitchen window, Mina couldn't see Mamani's house, but she knew it was there. Across the street, behind the greengrocer's, past the roofs of the smaller homes with the wrought-iron gates. Three streets down and to the left. It was a comfort to know that back there stood the redbrick house her grandparents had lived in for almost half a century. Roses carefully cultivated behind its gates. Pigeons competing for bread crumbs outside their windowsill. The bushes shining with droplets of water from the garden hose. As their
kotelet
browned one by one, Mina imagined her grandmother by her own stove, frying onions and singing along with the pop singer Googoosh's (now outlawed) tapes. She pictured her grandfather lying on his side on the burgundy cushions on their living room floor, leaning on his elbow, his head resting on his hand, as he read the evening paper and sipped from his teensy-tiny tea glass.

Evening fell. The sun melted and dissolved into the opal sky, casting a reddish hue on the greengrocer's tin roof. At this very moment, Mina knew that Mamani would turn off the stove. Put aside her fried onions and whatever else she was cooking (eggplant stew tonight?
aush
soup?) and go to the bathroom sink. There, she'd splash her face with water and stroke her forearms and toes with wet hands. She'd graze her hairline with water. Perfectly perform the ablutions for the evening prayer. Within minutes, Mamani would be on her prayer mat,
tasbih
prayer beads in hand as she melted into meditation. Mina pictured her grandmother's face: white, feathery skin, eyes half-shut, lips moving. Mamani's toes always stuck out from under the prayer chador. Soon Mamani would kneel, facing Mecca. And the next day, at the same time, she'd be kneeling in the same pose, having performed the same ablutions, sitting in the same perfect peace.

Mina watched Darya remove a few
kotelet
from the pan and place them on a paper towel to absorb the oil. Mina tried, but she couldn't muster up a mental image of Darya praying. Her mother's straight body wouldn't even bend into the right positions. She wouldn't want to spend her time standing, kneeling, sitting, murmuring words to an unseen entity. She'd say, “Enough of this,” pat her skirt, and go about accomplishing something. “It's a crutch,” Darya repeated to the kids. “Religion is a crutch for the weak. An escape. An illusion. A means to get manipulated. Don't get sucked into the propaganda!”

But there was a certain beauty to something you could count on like religion, Mina thought, as she scraped the last bits of the meat mixture into a lopsided shape and handed it to her mother. At least you knew what you were doing. Like Mamani. It could be sunny or snowing, they could be in the middle of a huge party or eating watermelon on the beach, a revolution could be going on in the streets with people collapsing in pools of blood, or it could be the middle of a parade for the monarchy's bicentennial—and one thing would hold true. At sunrise, noon, afternoon, sunset, and nighttime, her grandmother would be on her mat, saying her prayers, facing Mecca. And that, Mina thought, didn't seem like such a bad thing at all.

The day before the Friday holy day, Mina visited Mamani. She wound through the narrow streets, not quite skipping. She followed the water ditches,
joob
, till she reached her grandparents' home. Even outside the front door, she could smell Mamani's
aush
soup.

Mamani's hands were red from seeding pomegranates when she greeted her with a big hug and kisses. Agha Jan lay on the silk Persian rug in his pajamas, reading a book. Mina went to him and kissed him on the cheek.

“How many pomegranates do you want,
azeezam
?” Mamani asked as Mina followed her into the kitchen.

“Give her as many as she wants. Don't even ask. They're all for you, Mina Joon,” Agha Jan shouted from the living room.

Mina noticed the wooden box outside the kitchen windowsill. It still had bread crumbs for the pigeons.

Mamani stirred her
aush
soup. “I added extra noodles,
reshteh,
Mina Joon.” Without turning from the stove, she yelled, “Agha Jan!
Pasho!!
Get up! Get the yogurt!” She smiled at Mina. Then yelled again. “
Beeya!
Come on! This poor child is hungry.”

Agha Jan walked in and removed the yogurt he'd made from the fridge. Yogurt-making was his one contribution to the household cooking. Mamani did the rest. There was a certain distinctive taste to the cooking of the Daneshjoo women that Mina loved. Spices and recipes and secrets that Aunt Nikki and Darya now continued. Mina wondered if one day her stews would carry the same balance of turmeric and allspice. Would she be able to sauté her onions till they were perfectly translucent? Would she cut meat in the shape of diamonds, using the knife in that quick expert way? Mina watched as Mamani sprinkled cumin into the
aush.
She suddenly realized that her brothers wouldn't necessarily be folding
dolmeh
. She'd have to learn to carry on the works of art from her palette of spices just like the women before her.

After dinner, they ate pomegranates sprinkled with echinacea powder. Mina bit into the pomegranate seeds. The tart kernels burst into her mouth with a delicious rush.

“Do you like these pomegranates?” Mamani asked.

“Very much,” Mina said.

“Then I will get some more for you.”

“Ones just like these?”

“The best ones are at the
meeveh-foorooshi
downtown. I will get for my Mina Joon the pomegranates that she loves. Next time. Next time, I will go to the store downtown.”

“Thank you, Mamani. Thank you.”

THE NEWS THESE DAYS WAS ALL ABOUT
deaths. Not from people dying on the streets—the bloody revolution was over. But now came word of executions. Killing behind closed doors. Executions of all those who were too close to the Shah, too close to the West, too similar to what spies might be perceived to look like, too
taghooti
and attached to the monarchy, too short, too tall, too fat, too rich, too loud—it didn't seem to matter anymore. The killing did not stop. Mina knew all this, knew that her country had turned upside down, that a revolution was revolving into something else. She'd been told. The conversations at home were all about her brothers' changing political views and her parents' frustration at the hopelessness of it all.

But her grandparents seemed immune from the drama playing outside the walls of their house. They were detached from it all. Mina wanted some of their calm. How did they stick to their daily routines so diligently when the rest of the country was confused and in a state of chaos? Back in the kitchen, Mina watched Mamani spoon the remainder of the leftover onion, cucumber, and tomato salad into a ceramic dish for storage. Agha Jan sucked serenely on a lemon. Maybe their calmness was a reward of old age. Maybe this was the payoff for staying in the world long enough.